It’s always a risk taking a group of beginner and elementary English language learners to a museum art exhibition—especially one as layered and complex as Bokgabo ba Mašela: Art of Textiles exhibition currently on view in the Bridge Gallery. Many students are only just becoming confident speaking about their everyday lives, let alone the kinds of nuanced issues of gender, culture, memory, and power embedded in this exhibition’s woven works. But sometimes, risk pays off.

Curated by Uthando Baduza, the UP Museums Curator of Art Exhibitions and Galleries, the Bokgabo ba Mašela museum exhibition offered not only a visually arresting experience, but a teaching opportunity. Even before stepping into the museum gallery, the space invited a different kind of attentiveness. Surrounded by woven fabric and stories, students immediately began asking questions. “What does this mean?” “Who made that?” “Can we take pictures?” The museum exhibition created an atmosphere of gentle provocation, one that felt both safe and stimulating.

One of the standout moments for me as a teacher came after the walkabout. A student—unprompted—approached the curator to ask whether he thought the exhibition was feminist. The answer, of course, is less important than the question. The moment revealed that the student had not only looked but had begun to think critically and engage personally. That kind of engagement is a gift in the classroom, especially with adult learners from a wide range of backgrounds—some of whom hold values that may feel at odds with the progressive or challenging themes represented in the works. For those learners, the exhibition may have posed discomfort. For others, it opened new perspectives. For all, it offered material that could be returned to again and again in language lessons and personal reflection.

The English for Foreign Language (EFL) Centre for Language Learning (CLL) at the University of Pretoria is not an academic research program, but a practical language skills course. The aim is to equip students with usable English for study, work, and everyday life. What a museum exhibition like this allows, however, is a chance to learn language through critical engagement. Students do not just learn vocabulary—they learn a critical approach to texts through which to respond. They make personal connections to language. They practice speaking and writing that is motivated by feeling, by confusion, by curiosity. That’s when language learning comes alive.

Before the visit, students were provided with a set of materials to help them engage with the artworks—sentence starters, vocabulary support, and writing tasks to do after the visit. Students responded with drawings, brief written reflections, or selfies with certain works. This creative practice should not be underestimated; it became a basis for both joy and critical reflection. These responses served as jumping-off points in later classes for discussing not only the artworks, but students’ own artistic expression and memories.

Alongside this engagement, the museum exhibition was also a space of lightness and curiosity. Beyond posed photos, students asked unexpected questions, created impromptu sketches, and shared short writings about their emotional responses. These light moments are not separate from the learning—they are part of the warp and weft of how knowledge is internalized and shared.

While our visit to Bokgabo ba Mašela museum exhibition was anchored in English language teaching, the exhibition itself unravels with such richness and complexity that its pedagogical potential extends far beyond the language classroom. Just as the artworks themselves are often the product of collective making—stitched together by many hands, voices, and lived experiences—so too might the exhibition be approached by students across disciplines, each bringing their own interpretive threads.

Psychology students, for instance, might explore the emotional textures of the work: trauma, memory, and healing encoded in fabric. Health sciences students could reflect on the role of storytelling in sexual education, where textile metaphors and embodied practices invite deeper forms of empathy and openness. Drama and fine art students might find performance or critique, or a new direction in their own practice. Even engineering students might discover a different kind of structural intelligence in the intricacies of weaving and textile construction—or offer innovations that extend the medium’s possibilities.

In this way, the UP Museum exhibition functions as an interdisciplinary loom—a site where threads from diverse fields can be drawn together, examined, and rewoven. Importantly, many of the artworks are not made by solitary artists but by collectives, reminding us of our own status as a collective: a student body and faculty in dialogue, in movement, in formation. This mirrors the learning process itself—not linear, not always individual, but emergent, collaborative, and often unpredictable.

As a language teacher, I am always seeking ways to bring the outside world into the classroom—not just as subject matter, but as a way of opening up ways of thinking. Bokgabo ba Mašela gave us that opportunity. It challenged some students, excited others, and—most importantly—offered all of us a common fabric to gather around. I hope I have shown, perhaps with wide-eyed hope, that there is enormous potential for active collaboration between university departments and the museums, and I hope this visit might be the beginning of many more shared engagements with the arts for the Centre for Language Learning.

After all, in teaching—as in weaving—the strongest works are those made in connection, looped with intention, tension, and care.

Michael Wilson, Lecturer
Centre for Language Learning